Sunday, October 11, 2009
Outdoors Computing
I've realized there are two things that make me happier than anything else: outdoors and computers. I think from now on this blog will be mostly stories relating to those two things. Luckily, that just makes my blog title a double entendre and thus I'm officially funny on the internet.
My latest computing exploit has been reading through Artifical Intelligence: A Modern Approach 2E (AIMA). I'm on Ch. 3, which is all about search trees and different algorithms to search through them. They presented a few interesting problems which I plan on coding up and solving in the next couple of days; I'll be sure to host my code here as well as on some public code repositories (yay open source learning code!). The problems are:
In addition to the book; I've been following CarlH to touch up on some programming basics; the course is below me because it starts from the very basics, but its fun to read and interesting to see how he presents the ideas to beginners. I think its the best coding tutorial I've ever seen.
Now for outdoors! I went abseiling this weekend. Did a multipitch abseil in the Blue Mountains (picture below; the entire area I was in is vertical cliffs leading to a tree filled valley, beautiful)., just outside of Katoomba. For those Americans (like me), abseiling is the non USA way of saying rappelling. I learned how to self belay using a prosik on an abseil and also how to safely attach two ropes for longer abseils. Turns out all you have to do is join them with a double over hand knot. The abseil took a good deal of time, in large part because I was setting up/helping set up the ropes for each pitch...takes a bit of practice before you get quick.
(Pictures Courtesy of: http://home.chello.no/~dudley/images/8puzzle.jpg, www.8puzzle.com/8_puzzle_algorithm.html , http://www.australiantraveller.com/images/imported/Escarpment,-Blue-Mountains.jpg, respectively)
¶ 8:38 PM 
My latest computing exploit has been reading through Artifical Intelligence: A Modern Approach 2E (AIMA). I'm on Ch. 3, which is all about search trees and different algorithms to search through them. They presented a few interesting problems which I plan on coding up and solving in the next couple of days; I'll be sure to host my code here as well as on some public code repositories (yay open source learning code!). The problems are:
- 8 Queens Problem: Try to put 8 queens on a chess board such that they can't attack each other.
In addition to the book; I've been following CarlH to touch up on some programming basics; the course is below me because it starts from the very basics, but its fun to read and interesting to see how he presents the ideas to beginners. I think its the best coding tutorial I've ever seen.Now for outdoors! I went abseiling this weekend. Did a multipitch abseil in the Blue Mountains (picture below; the entire area I was in is vertical cliffs leading to a tree filled valley, beautiful)., just outside of Katoomba. For those Americans (like me), abseiling is the non USA way of saying rappelling. I learned how to self belay using a prosik on an abseil and also how to safely attach two ropes for longer abseils. Turns out all you have to do is join them with a double over hand knot. The abseil took a good deal of time, in large part because I was setting up/helping set up the ropes for each pitch...takes a bit of practice before you get quick.
(Pictures Courtesy of: http://home.chello.no/~dudley/images/8puzzle.jpg, www.8puzzle.com/
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